It is the winter of three snows in Austin. With the first snow and its ice-covered streets comes news of my mother, in another city’s hospital, with a breast lopped off. Second snow — and Austin, not used to such snow, again covered in white — finds me by myself waiting for a teenage daughter who picks the coldest night to run away to the bed of an old carnie twice her age. It is the third snow. The air itself has turned to ice but I walk downtown early anyway to open the bookstore for snow refugees laid off from school and work, for motorists warned off the streets. A woman in a black suit is waiting in a car across the street when I turn the lock and the sign to “Open.” She follows me in and when I answer yes to her question of managership, she opens her wallet and flashes a card. Then she begins to call me Pat and I call her Dolores.